Building a basic PC with Intel's CA810E motherboard

Review date: 14 February 2000.
Last modified
03-Dec-2011.

All-in-one motherboards have a bad reputation.

The idea is a good one, though. All IBM compatible computers use separate
graphics, and probably also sound, hardware. Most of them have this hardware
on sound and graphics cards, which attach to the motherboard - the central
board that all of the other computer components connect to. Driver software
for whatever Operating System (OS) the PC's running tells the OS how to
talk to the graphics and sound card.

But the graphics and sound hardware doesn't have to be on separate cards.
Graphics, sound, and maybe networking as well, can all be built into the
motherboard. It still works much the same way - you still need the drivers
for whatever kind of "cards" are built in - but you don't take up space,
expansion slots and money with the extra paraphernalia required by the separate-card
versions of the hardware.

All things being equal, the all-in-one approach leaves more room for
specialised expansions, if the user wants them; if the user doesn't, the
result is just a nice neat cheap computer which can be assembled from scratch
in a startlingly short time. Sure, the built in graphics and sound aren't
likely to win any awards, but as a plain basic computer it should be great.

Emphasis on the should.

Historically, all-in-one motherboards have been a big pain. The on-board
hardware may be something outlandish which comes with poor drivers, or it
may be close to but not quite the same as the stand-alone card version of
the same thing. And if you want to upgrade, look out; all-in-one boards
are famous for not letting you disable their built-in gear properly, and
for not even having the expandability that comes with normal motherboards.

If you think a Compaq with "AGP graphics!" on the side of the box is
definitely going to have an AGP slot, think again. That AGP graphics adapter
is probably built into the motherboard, and there's no slot for a replacement.

Frankly, though, I think anyone who buys an all-in-one board with the
intention of one day beefing up any of the things it has built in is missing
the point. That's not what these boards are for. They're for saving money
and making setup simpler, not for building red hot ninja computers.

Many people who find themselves unwillingly stuck with these machines
have been tricked into it by some salesman who said an all-in-one machine
was upgradable, without specifying exactly how. Sure, you can put in a bigger
hard drive or plug in a new monitor or add a SCSI card or, probably, upgrade
the CPU; there are all sorts of things you can add to an all-in-one. Just
don't count on being able to improve the graphics and sound.

If you know what you're getting into, an all-in-one can be a great option.
If an all-in-one board uses decent hardware and thus works properly out
of the box, and you don't want to change the graphics adaptor or
sound card or whatever else it has on board, it can end up being a rather
good deal.

Intel's option

And here's a perfect example. Intel's CA810 series of motherboards all
have graphics and sound built in. The graphics adaptor is a thoroughly capable
2D card, more than good enough for anything but 3D games on monitors as
big as you like. For 3D its performance is not awful, but not exciting,
either; it performs more or less like a good old Voodoo 2 card, except it
can run in higher resolutions and numbers of colours. That's not a great
idea, though; for decent frame rates, 800 by 600 in 16 bit colour is the
go.

The built in sound hardware is the Sound Blaster 128 chipset, as seen
on many cheap and cheerful sound cards. It's no good for fancy positional
audio or studio MIDI work, but for this purpose it's perfect.

The current versions of the CA810 boards work with both Plastic Pin Grid
Array (PPGA) and Flip-Chip Pin Grid Array (FC-PGA) processors (see my slotket
review here to see what this is all about).

So you can plug any recent Celeron into them, and the new FC-PGA Pentium
IIIs as well. Intel is going to migrate its entire P-III line to FC-PGA,
so the CA810 line won't be starved for processors.

The original CA810 board only supported 66MHz Front Side Bus (FSB), so
you could use it only with Celerons. The newer versions with a CA810A3 or
CA810AL3 product code also support 100MHz FSB, so you can use 100MHz-based
FC-PGA P-IIIs as well. These newer CA810s sell in Australia for $AU230.

The original CA810E supported 66MHz and 100MHz FSB, but the newer ones
support 133MHz as well, making them compatible with the higher FSB "EB"
Pentium IIIs, although none of these processors are yet available in the
FC-PGA package. The only FC-PGA P-IIIs available as I write this are the
100MHz FSB 500E and 550E.

I checked out the top of the line CA810E, which comes not just with sound
and video built in but also with the optional Intel 82559-based 10/100 megabit
network adapter. This board sells for about $AU350.

With all of the built in gear, all you need to add to the motherboard
is a processor and some RAM (standard low cost SDRAM modules). Plug in your
drives and the case switch and light connectors, hook up the power, slap
the case back on and you're in business. If you've never assembled your
own computer before, this is about as simple as it can be.

The job of assembling a computer, though, can still be quite alarming
to the newcomer. So here's the step by step guide.

Picking your parts

Step one is to pile up the other components. You've got the motherboard;
what else do you need?

CPU

This is meant to be a basic computer, not a power user's machine, but
the CA810E certainly gives you the option. It'll work with very fast
P-IIIs, when they're available in the FC-PGA form factor. At present, though,
they're not; the fastest CPU you can plug into the CA810E is a 550MHz P-III.

You're looking at about $AU650 for a P-III 550E, or about $AU500 for
a 500E. That's a 30% price difference for 10% more CPU performance; remember,
a 10% faster CPU doesn't give you a computer that's 10% faster overall.

The next step down for CA810 customers is a Celeron, which offers most
of the performance for a lot less money. The 533MHz Celeron is not a lot
slower than the 500MHz P-III for pretty much anything that anyone's going
to do with an ordinary PC, but it'll only cost you $AU380 or so.

And if you're happy to buy a less zippy processor to be going on with,
maybe because you're waiting for cheaper, faster FC-PGA P-IIIs to come out,
then a 433MHz Celeron will set you back less than $AU200. It'll give you
something like two-thirds of the P-III 550E's speed, for less than a third
of its price.

P-III on the left, Celeron on the right.

Intel had kindly provided me with a 500E along with the CA810E, but I
had already found the P-III a high-speed home on an Abit BF6 (see my overclocking
article here). The CA810 can't do any of the fancy
tricks of the Taiwanese hot rod boards; Intel motherboards, oddly enough,
absolutely will not run CPUs faster than their sticker speed. Funny, that.
But I had a perfectly good 400MHz Celeron to hand, so onto the 810 parts
pile it went.

A 400MHz Celeron is old enough, now, that you may have trouble finding
one in the stores. If you can, expect to pay well under $AU200, and expect
to be well pleased with the speed you get for your money. This CPU is more
than adequate for games, business apps and image processing on any current
OS you want to throw at it, including Windows 2000.

RAM

Because I was only using a Celeron, which runs from a 66MHz Front Side
Bus, I only needed old-model PC66 SDRAM. You're not likely to be able to
find RAM that slow in the shops at the moment, though; PC100 is the slowest
on the shelves. RAM prices are set to fall pretty steeply in the near future
as I write this; at present, though, a single 128Mb PC100 SDRAM module will
set you back about $AU325.

You can make do with 64Mb of RAM ($AU170 or so), but 128Mb is considerably
nicer for Win95/98 and pretty much essential for Windows 2000.

And if you're planning to upgrade to a 133MHz FSB processor, or even
if you aren't, PC133 memory costs only a little more than PC100.

Case

The biggest part of the PC is the box the other bits live in. But cases
can be surprisingly inexpensive.

Because the CA810 boards use the
microATX form factor, your
case can be quite small. If you want to mount them in a big case you can
do that too - the plethora of mounting points in all half-decent current
cases mean you can fit pretty much any board into them - but for a basic
computer, there's no point buying a huge tower case.

For this machine, I picked In Win's D500 desktop case. It's a microATX
case with three 3.5 inch drive bays and a single 5.25 inch, and it costs
only $AU110 including the little 145 watt Power Supply Unit (PSU) that's
standard for microATX machines. 145W is well under spec for a high powered
regular computer - 250W or 300W supplies are standard issue for serious
machines, though many cases come with questionable 235W PSUs - but it's
perfectly adequate for a basic machine like this.

Drives

I picked a yum cha Delta "44X" CD-ROM drive. Like
all cheap CAV CD-ROM drives, its monster speed figure
is quite optimistic - "44X" is almost 6.5 megabytes per second, and you're
not likely to ever see it. But it only costs $AU85, slightly more than twice
the price of the Panasonic 3.5 inch floppy drive I also added to the pile.

A Fujitsu "4.3Gb" hard drive for another $AU200 rounded out the package.
I put the capacity figure in quote marks, because no hard drive actually
has as much space as its specifications seem to imply. Hard disk manufacturers
specify their drive capacities in millions and billions of bytes, not the
numbers based on powers of two that they ought to use. A megabyte is 2^20
(1,048,576) bytes; a gigabyte is 2^30 (1,073,741,824) bytes. In real
capacity, therefore, the Fujitsu clocks in at only 4Gb, and loses a few
more per cent when you format it. Newcomers to do-it-yourself PC assembly
often wonder where that extra drive capacity went; into the pockets of the
marketing people, that's where!

Monitor choice

If you don't already have a monitor kicking around, the only choice for
a true budget computer is a 15 inch screen. You can get perfectly good 15s
for $AU300. If you're going to be using the computer a lot, a 17 inch monitor
will let you use 1024 by 768 without squinting at fuzzy pixels, and only
cost another $200 or so. 19 inch and larger monitors will, of course, work
just fine with the CA810 - its built-in graphics adapter can output 1600
by 1200 2D video at a healthy 85Hz refresh rate, so for business applications
and anything else that uses ordinary 2D video, the sky's the limit for monitor
size.

For 3D, though, resolutions above 800 by 600 or, maybe, 1024 by 768 will
be annoyingly slow on an 810 board, and considering the alarming prices
of large monitors, you're not going to be buying one as part of a budget
PC, anyway.

The 810 boards have USB and PS/2 ports, so you should get a PS/2 or USB
mouse (PS/2, if you're using Linux, because Linux doesn't understand USB
yet). Serial mouses on PCs have a nastily low sampling rate - the number
of times per second the mouse position is updated. Likewise, you can use
a PS/2 or USB keyboard. There's not much reason to bother with a USB one
on a computer like this that's not going to be short of system resources.

If you go for the cheap options, then mouse, keyboard and speakers should
cost you about $AU75 all together. Get the Rolls-Royce versions and you're
talking $AU300 or more.

Building it

The tools of the trade. All you need to assemble a modern PC is a Phillips
head screwdriver. This is my nice little Japanese made Vessel brand ratchet
driver, but any old medium sized Phillips driver will do. The dingus above
the driver is a 5mm socket, for tightening the hexagonal brass standoffs
that the motherboard mounts onto, in most cases. The In Win D500 doesn't
use these standoffs; it just has bumps in the base case metal that do the
same job. If your case uses standoffs, and you don't have a 5mm nut driver,
don't worry. Pliers do just as well - like everything else in a PC, you
don't need to do them up too tight.

If you have big meaty fingers or just aren't too dextrous, you'll also
need needle-nose pliers, tweezers with serrated jaws or hemostats (my favourite),
if you need to adjust circuit board jumpers. You won't need to worry about
this if you're building a basic computer, as everything can be left in its
default state; there's only one jumper block on the CA810 boards, for BIOS
configuration, and most users will only need to touch it if they set a BIOS
password and then forget what it is.

The hemostat, commonly sold as a "scissor clamp" or incorrectly referred
to as forceps, is the king of all jumper-yanking devices. If you use them,
be careful, though; pliers and hemostats are eminently capable of crushing
the fragile plastic jumper blocks.

Here we have the four kinds of threaded fastener you'll get in the bag
of bits that comes with most cases. The one on the left is a fine-pitch
screw used for mounting floppy and CD-ROM drives. These screws often have
a combination head - a Phillips cross with half of the cross extended to
fit an ordinary slotted screwdriver, like so:

Do not fall victim to the temptation to actually use
a slotted driver on one of these screws. Flathead drivers are made by people
in league with hardware manufacturers, who are delighted by their tendency
to skate off the screw-head and gouge valuable computer equipment.

The other three screws all have the same coarser thread. Second from
left is a coarse pitch short screw used for mounting hard drives (longer
screws can thread in too far and damage the drive), followed by a hexagonal
standoff that screws into the case and into which the motherboard mounting
screws thread. The one on the right is the most common kind of screw; it's
got a standard Phillips cross head. You use these screws for holding the
case together, mounting expansion cards (which this basic PC doesn't need!),
and mounting the motherboard itself.

Incidentally, if you're having trouble removing one of these last types,
the hexagonal head shape outside the Phillips cross is a perfect match for
a quarter inch nut driver. Quarter inch is the standard size for all hexagonal
screwdriver bits, so any exchangeable bit screwdriver, including my nifty
little ratchet driver and almost any cordless screwdriver you care to name,
will fit. Cheaper versions of these screws have rounded shoulders on the
hex head that stop you from getting a proper grip, but most of them work
well.

You may also get one or more nylon things that look something like this.
These are another kind of motherboard standoff, and should be used wherever
a hole in the motherboard - maybe a roughly oval "double hole", maybe just
a round hole bigger than the normal screw holes - coincides with a matching
larger hole in the case.

Many cases have keyhole shaped cutouts that the nylon standoffs slide
into, the idea being that you can leave them snapped into the holes in the
motherboard and just slide it across a bit and lift it out. In the real
world, the motherboard usually hits the case edge before the bases of the
standoffs have moved far enough to disengage.

Nonetheless, nylon standoffs are good extra support for the corners of
larger form factor motherboards, which usually have at least one corner
flapping in the breeze far from a mounting screw. If you forget about this
and, later on, push a connector on near that corner while the motherboard's
mounted in the case, you can flex the board enough to break things.

Once you've got your tools and know what each screw type is for, it's
time to open some boxes and prepare your motherboard.

RTFM!

The CA810 motherboards have most of their documentation on a CD-ROM,
which is not too helpful if you don't have a working PC yet. But they, and
every other motherboard out there, also come with basic paper docs that
tell you what plugs in where.

Read The... Fine...
Manual.

This tutorial tells you what to do and when, but in all likelihood the
gear you choose to build your computer will not be the same as the gear
I chose, and beginners may find themselves puzzled anyway. When something
comes with instructions, read them. And take your time; if you're not sure
about something, read the docs again, and have a think about it. It's not
a race.

RAM and processor installation

It's easiest to install memory modules and the CPU when the motherboard's
still out of the case. Both tasks are very easy with a Socket 370 board.

With the motherboard sitting on something with a bit of give - a newspaper
on a table is fine - fold the memory module slot clips outward, line up
a module so its edge connector matches the slot (there are cut-outs that
make it only possible to install the module one way around), and press it
firmly into place. The side clips will swing in and snap into place automatically.
The CA810 boards have only two memory slots, but with 128Mb modules freely
available this still lets you install plenty of RAM if you want to.

Installing the CPU is just as easy. Socket 370 boards use a "Zero Insertion
Force" (ZIF) CPU socket. Swing up the lever beside the socket, and just
drop the CPU into place. It only fits in one orientation. Swing the lever
back down until it clips in place, and your CPU is mounted.

This Celeron had been in another machine, running faster than its stock
speed, so I'd ditched the standard conductive pad that mounts on its heatsink
and replaced it with thermal grease, as shown. For stock performance, the
standard rubbery pads are fine.

Now, you clip on the processor cooler, the heatsink-and-fan arrangement
that mounts on the top of the socket. This is easy to do, as long as you
know that the CPU can stand a lot of pressure from its cooling hardware,
so it's OK to apply a solid push to the clip to make it latch onto the catches
on either side of the socket.

Here's the cooler in place; you can see one end of the clip at the right.

It's important to remember to plug in the processor fan cable to the
connector provided, next to the RAM sockets. Otherwise your computer will
work for a few minutes, then crash as the CPU overheats. No harm is likely
to be done to anything but your sanity if you forget to plug the fan in.

Motherboard mounting

Now it's time to prepare the case and install the motherboard.

Like most desktop cases, the D500 is very easy to open. Just remove one
screw from the middle at the back and the lid slides forward and hinges
off.

If you'd rather it were a little harder to open, you
can turn this gizmo at the back of the lid around. The loop will stick out
through a slot in the case and you can snap a padlock through it.

It's easy to see what motherboard holes line up with what screw holes
in a case, but there are often small chances to mess up.

Like, for example, this one. This shows the one location in the D500,
next to the drive bays, where you should install a nylon standoff if you're
installing a CA810 board. There's another hole where a standoff can go,
but it doesn't match a hole in the motherboard. So if you put a standoff
there, you will have to employ pliers and profanity to remove it again.

The back of ATX and microATX cases has a standard rectangular hole where
you can install a plate with cutouts that match the connectors on your motherboard.
Motherboards come with plates to match them, if they don't use the stock
ATX connector layout. Here, I've removed the stock plate that came with
the D500 and replaced it with the one that came with the CA810E. It's a
simple snap-in replacement.

Because the D500 doesn't use the normal hexagonal brass standoffs, all
you need to do is pop in the one nylon standoff, line up your motherboard,
and screw it in place. Installing the brass standoffs in a less simple case
is easy enough, too.

You may get, in the little bag of screws and stuff that comes with your
case, a collection of fibre washers that fit onto the motherboard-mounting
screws. You can use these washers if you like, or not; it makes little difference
to the security of the motherboard, and none to the motherboard earthing.
If you've got a tendency to overtighten screws, using the washers may help.
Just mellowing out a bit will help more, though.

Drive mounting

Most cases have simple metal drive bays that you slide the drives into,
then screw them in place through holes in the sides of the bays that line
up with holes in the sides of the drives.

The D500, however, uses side rails that you screw onto the drives, which
then clip neatly into the bays. This doesn't really take any less time than
mounting drives the old-fashioned way, but it makes it easier to take them
out again. The floppy drive is shown above...

And here are the CD-ROM and hard drive.

The floppy drive clips into this plastic cage that, itself, clips into
the front of the D500. You don't need to remove the cage to install the
floppy drive. If you want to install a second system fan, though, this is
where you do it, in the box section at the bottom. A standard 80mm fan just
clips into the box. I didn't see any need to do this for a low-spec machine
like this; if you do, make sure the fan is aligned so that it sucks air
into the computer, or it'll be fighting the exhaust fan in the power supply.

The hard and CD-ROM drives, installed in the bays to the right of the
floppy/fan mounting cage. I installed the hard drive in the bottom bay to
keep some air space between these two warm components. The perforated panel
in the middle is the standard bay cover, which you have to pop out to install
a 3.5 inch drive. There's no such cover for the single 5.25 inch bay.

Cables, cables, cables

You'll need to plug various things in now. The only really confusing
part is getting the wide, flat "ribbon" cables for the drives around the
right way. There's a red-striped wire on one edge of every ribbon cable;
it denotes the side that should be connected to Pin 1 on each drive and
motherboard socket.

This floppy drive, (mounted in a different case form the D500, so you
can clearly see it) has the decency to clearly label the sides of the connector
- the "2" and "34" printed beneath the projecting header at the left of
the drive are the pin numbers nearest the printing. Pin 1 is at the top
left, pin 2 at the bottom left. So you connect the pin-1, striped, side
of the edge connector on the end of the floppy cable to
the low-numbered side of the drive header. If you connect the floppy drive
to the middle connector on the cable, it'll be identified as drive B instead
of drive A (the twist in part of the cable between the connectors is what
identifies the drives).

The drive with cables connected. The floppy drive is the only one that
uses the smaller Berg power connectors from the power supply; all other
drives use the chunkier Molex versions, as shown below. Both kinds of connector
are keyed - you can only plug them in one way.

In case you're interested, the yellow wire is +12V, the red wire is +5V,
and the black wires are both grounds.

These connectors are easy enough to attach, but sometimes stick fast
in drive power sockets. The sockets are only held onto most drives by solder,
so don't go nuts trying to wrench a seized power connector out. Prolonged
fairly gentle wiggling should do the job.

The CA810E has the standard three drive connectors - two 40 pin IDE connectors,
one 36 pin floppy connector - in an unusual but handy staggered layout,
with the floppy connector in the middle. The white connector to the left
is the motherboard power socket, which the case power supply plugs into.

You only get one IDE ribbon cable with the CA810E, which is fine; two
drives can be used from one IDE channel. Each end of the ribbon cable has
a connector, and there's one more that's much closer to one end than it
is to the other. The end with the two close-spaced connectors is for the
drives; the other end is for the motherboard.

Motherboard ribbon cable connectors are always "keyed"; they have a small
cut-out one one edge (the right edge in the image above) which mates with
a protrusion on many, but not all, ribbon cable plugs. With keyed connectors,
you can't go wrong unless someone's wired the cable backwards; you just
plug the cable in the only way it'll go and you're done. With unkeyed connectors,
you have to remember that when the key-slot is at the top, Pin 1 is to the
left.

Some IDE connectors and cables are keyed in another way - Pin 20 is missing
from the socket, and blocked in the plug. This makes it impossible to plug
the connector in the wrong way around even if it doesn't have the slot-key
protrusion, but cables with the blocked pin can't be plugged in at all if
a socket doesn't have the corresponding missing pin.

When you've got two IDE devices on one cable, one has to be set to "Master"
and one to "Slave". By default, hard drives come set to Master and CD-ROM
drives come set to Slave, so nothing need be changed. The drive manuals
show you what to do with the back-of-drive jumpers to change the mode.

It doesn't matter what order you plug the drives into the cable; the
Master can be on the middle or the end connector.

Here's a hard drive using the middle connector.

If you want CD audio to be playable via the CD-ROM's normal analogue
output - these days, this is pretty much only useful for playing audio CDs
on your computer - you'll need to connect the CD-ROM sound output. The CD-ROM
ought to come with a cable to do this, but they're close to free anyway.
These cables are often not keyed at one or both ends - the sockets may be
keyed, but the plugs aren't. But if you get them backwards, you just reverse
the stereo channels and do no harm. The right signal wire is red, the left
signal wire is white, the ground wires are black. Don't worry if your cable
only has one ground wire.

Because of the CA810's onboard audio hardware, the other end of the CD
audio cable goes to this motherboard connector. In most PCs, it goes to
the sound card.

The ATX motherboard power connector can only plug in one way, and is
all one piece. This may seem obvious, but it isn't; old AT-type motherboard
power connectors came in two parts:

This is the way around you were supposed to connect them, with the black
wires in the middle. Woe betide you if you got them backwards.

Fiddly little connectors

Ah, case connectors. These weeny little blighters attach to an equally
fiddly header block on the motherboard, typically with cryptic labelling.
If you refer to the manual you can figure it out; if you try to read the
board you'll be flummoxed.

These little connectors are for all of the case lights and switches -
the power and reset switches, the hard drive and power lights. There's also
a speaker connector, which you need to hook up to most motherboards, but
not the CA810 series...

...because they've got a speaker built in.

If you've got a dodgy case, the little connectors may be unlabelled.
You can identify them by tracing them back to what they connect to on the
front panel. Remember that the coloured, as opposed to white or black, wire
is the positive one, meant to go to the first pin of that bit of the motherboard
header. It doesn't matter if you get switch connectors backwards, as they'll
still work, but the Light Emitting Diode (LED) lights only work if they're
connected the right way around.

Finishing up

Because this computer needs no expansion cards, I screwed the included
back panel slot covers in place over all four slots. This isn't just for
neatness; case air flow works better if you block extra vents like this.

The finished, closed, box. Plug in keyboard, monitor and power and fire
it up, and you should get a BIOS screen, which on recent Intel boards is
a show-off piece:

Add up the value

A budget Via chipset based motherboard that'll take 133MHz FSB Intel
processors will cost you at least $AU200. Realistically, the 100MHz FSB
capability is not very important, especially for a low-cost machine, so
you could use any current board and save a little more. You don't have to
buy a Socket 370 board to use Socket 370 processors; "slotkets" let you
use them on Slot 1 boards. See my review here.

Slotkets cost less than $AU30, and many dealers will throw one in with
a processor.

A graphics card as unexciting as the adapter included in the 810 chipset
will cost you, maybe, $AU100. It's actually fairly difficult to find a card
with roughly the same 3D performance as the 810; it falls between the unplayable
slowness of cards that don't actually have any 3D capabilities to
speak of, and the quite nippy performance of budget "proper" 3D cards like
old TNT-1s (like the Diamond Viper V550, which I reviewed
here) and TNT-2 M64s (I review a couple of these
here). No-3D cards cost well under $AU100; budget
proper 3D cards cost around $AU200.

A Sound Blaster 128 sound card to match the 810's built in hardware will
set you back another $AU70. And a network card will cost you $AU45; the
"genuine Intel" version to match the adapter built into the CA810E costs
$AU139, but there's really nothing amazing about the Intel network cards,
and there are lots of others that work just as well.

So, in the final analysis, building a machine more or less like one based
on the $AU350 CA810E by using a normal motherboard and separate cards will
cost you more than $AU50 more. Use a bargain basement video card and you
may end up paying about the same money, but you'll end up with a computer
that's no good for 3D games at all. If you don't need networking or 133MHz
FSB and therefore go with the plain CA810, the all-in-one looks more attractive
- it's $AU230, versus $AU370 or so for the conventional alternative.

CD-ROM terminology

44X: NEC invented the "X" terminology
for describing CD-ROM drive speeds, and it's now spilled over into DVD-ROM
drive descriptions as well. The number before the X tells you the drive's
speed as a multiple of the speed of a first generation CD-ROM drive, which
could transfer 150 kilobytes of data per second. So a 44X drive can pump
6600 kilobytes per second, right?

Well, yes and no. Mainly no.

There are two basic ways for a CD-ROM drive
to work; Constant Linear Velocity (CLV) and Constant Angular Velocity (CAV).

A CLV drive changes its speed of rotation according to the head
location - it spins the disc faster when the head's reading from the middle
of the disc. It does this in order to maintain a steady data transfer rate.

Audio CD players have to be CLV, because audio demands a constant
data rate, but CDs store data at a constant density per unit length of track
all over the disc. Since there's thus more data per revolution on the outside
of the disc than the inside, you have to change the rotation speed to keep
the transfer rate constant.

An audio CD player's rotational speed varies from about 210 to
539 revolutions per minute from the outside to the inside; first-generation
"1X" CD-ROM drives are exactly the same.

But for CD-ROM data transfer, you don't need to maintain a steady
data rate - the faster the better. As long as the drive is always at least
as fast as it has to be for a given application, everything's fine. This
is the philosophy behind CAV.

A CAV drive maintains the same revolutions per minute wherever
the head is. Since data on the CD is laid down at the same density all over
the disc, this means that the drive delivers data faster when the head is
at the edge of the disc than when it's closer to the centre.

LP records (remember those?) are CAV - they're 33 and a third
RPM all the way, and get away with it because the inner tracks are more
densely recorded than the outer ones.

In order to make them sound more impressive, the speed of a CAV
drive is invariably quoted as the speed it can manage when reading the outer
edge of a CD.

The outermost edge of the data storage area on a CD has a circumference
of about 366mm. The innermost circumference, however, is only 135mm.
So a CAV drive with a given rating for the outermost edge will have a speed
for the innermost edge only about 37% of that rating; a "44X" CAV drive
has a minimum speed of only about "16X". The halfway point, where half of
a full disc's data lies inwards of the head and half of the data lies outwards,
is about 60% of the way out; here, the 44X drive will have roughly "27X"
performance.

This will not be its average speed over all discs, though. CD
data is recorded starting in the middle of the disc and moving to the outside.
This means CAV drives are incapable of achieving their maximum performance
on any disc which is not completely full - about 650Mb of data. For the
same reason, they won't perform at full speed on "CD-single" sized discs.
Since many discs aren't completely full, the actual average performance
of a CAV drive, taken over all CD-ROMs, is about half of its rated speed.

Some mid-speed drives use a mixture of CAV and CLV; CAV for the
outside of the disc, and CLV to spin the disc faster for the inner tracks.
This is not possible with current superfast CAV drives; a 40X drive screams
along at more than 9200RPM. If it tried to maintain the same linear velocity
for the inner tracks, it'd be doing more than 21,000 RPM. The fastest current
hard drives have a rotational speed of 10,000RPM (all hard drives are CAV),
and that's with finely machined, 80mm aluminium platters on a very straight
spindle, not 120mm stamped plastic discs held in a clamp.

There is practically no consumer storage hardware that can handle
the full data transfer rate of a modern CD-ROM drive, but the ludicrous
maximum speed means that more of the disc will be accessible as fast as
the computer can handle it - a 44X drive can deliver about 2.4 megabytes
per second, even on the centre tracks. Just don't believe the hype.

Don't overtighten!

Remember, you're building a computer, not a bridge. If you tighten all
of your screws until they beg for mercy you're likely to strip the screw,
strip the hole, rip the head clean off the screw (computer screws are often
of lousy quality), overstress an expansion card by twisting its tab, or
crack the motherboard. Just snug them down so they can't be undone with
your fingers, and that's good enough. On a related note...

Don't use an electric screwdriver!

Cordless screwdrivers (not a dreadfully informative name; pretty much
all screwdrivers are cordless, when you think about it) are great if you
have to drive a lot of big screws. When building a computer you only have
to drive a few little ones, so you won't get the job done much faster by
using a power driver, and even if your screwdriver has a torque control,
it's quite possible you'll overtighten screws. Electric screwdrivers also
tend to be big and clunky, which makes it hard to use them for fiddly jobs
like tightening motherboard screws next to case metalwork.

Static electricity, which you pick up and dissipate pretty much every
time you move or touch something, can destroy the more sensitive electronics
in various computer components. The crackling you get when you stroke a
cat on a dry day is thousands and thousands of volts of static (the current
is so vanishingly low that there's no danger to you at all, unless the sparking
startles the cat...), but as little as 200 volts is enough to fry components.
You won't feel a 200 volt discharge at all.

Realistically, it's pretty unlikely that you'll destroy any components
of your new computer with static electricity. You're much more likely to
drop them or overtighten something or bend connector pins. There, that made
you feel better, didn't it?

To remove the risk of static damage completely, though, you can buy anti-static
wrist or ankle straps for less than $20. A wire leads from the strap to
a reference earth, generally the frame of the computer, which must be plugged
into the wall but needn't be turned on. True paranoids also use anti-static
work mats to lay all the components on.

You don't need to buy geek jewelry in order to be static-safe, though.
If you have carpet, especially wool or synthetic, try to find an uncarpeted
place to work. Plug the case in as recommended above, and just touch any
piece of exposed metalwork periodically while working. It's just feasible
that you'll still cook a component somehow, but I for one would be more
worried about the risk of a jumbo jet crashing into my house.